Tired of Food? You Can Finally Get Your Hands on Some Yummy Soylent

Last year a product called Soylent briefly dominated food news, which is ironic since it’s basically an anti-food. If you recall (or if you don’t), Soylent is a liquid that is supposed to provide all of the minerals, vitamins and other nutrients you need to survive, so you’ll never need to eat food again.

As of last Friday, Soylent went from a fanciful idea to an actual product that could be sent to your home, as shipments went out to its early backers. Now, you can order some for yourself and prepare to drink it up. In an interview conducted shortly before Soylent hit the market and posted yesterday, Rob Rhinehart, the company’s founder, insisted that this is not some fad diet, but a way to unshackle from the chains of having to eat food. “I’m looking forward to the point where we don’t have to worry about hunger, or nutrition. Where people make food just because it’s beautiful—like gardening, or painting. I’m looking forward to the point where food can just be art.”

Another fun detail: Rhinehart almost entirely stopped producing waste (a technical term) when he went on the Soylent-only diet. If that sort of thing interests you, it has to do with the fact that most of our waste comes from fiber and Soylent has very little of that.

We obviously like food as art, but we also like food as food, so we’re not anxious to give it up in the name of efficiency. But with more than 22,000 backers already and its own sub-Reddit, Soylent seems like it may be here to stay.

Tell us what you would miss most if you traded food for Soylent @Foodandwine using #FWx.